The "founder-market fit" trap

You've probably heard an advisor or investor tell you to build something in a market you understand deeply.

That's the "founder-market fit" theory: that you'll be best positioned to beat your competition if you focus on a problem or customer you have extensive experience with.

It sounds good on paper, but it's absolutely terrible advice.

Founder-market fit sounds intuitive as a theory, but it has inherent logical fallacies that only become clear years later after you're wondering why hypergrowth isn't materializing.

The good news is there's a different way to pick your market and decide what to build.

Today, I'll share how to avoid the founder-market fit trap and instead set yourself up to build something great.

You are not your customer

It's not crazy to start your product journey trying to solve a problem you've faced.

But here's the thing: even if you're a customer for your product, you're not ALL your customers.

This is a lesson I've learned repeatedly. Even at Blaze, where I use our product every day, I'm not our canonical customer. I'm a founder of a venture-backed startup, not a small business owner or entrepreneur struggling to grow with limited resources.

And because you're not your only customer, you don't really know what they want. I've been building products for 15 years, and yet I'm wrong all the time about what our customers want. Most of the amazing founders I know say the same thing. Like Babe Ruth, even if you have extraordinary product instincts, your batting average for correct takes is probably only 30%.

So if you're only building for yourself—an n of 1—chances are you won't know enough to build a massive business. Venture-scale success means acquiring 10,000 enterprise customers or millions of consumers to build a $1b business. To win at that level, you'll need more than just your knowledge and experience to solve a problem really well for a lot of people.

What about "earned secrets?"

Plenty of founders think that their "earned secrets"—the insider knowledge they gain from years of specific experience—give them an edge. If you've been an engineer for years, you might know what developers really need, for example.

There's some truth to that on the margins. I know a founder who was a lawyer specializing in child privacy regulations. He spent years understanding exactly what tech companies are allowed to do with kids' data. It gave him a competitive advantage in a very bespoke space, and he's built an amazing company off that valuable knowledge.

But your individual experience is not enough on its own. Even if your expertise perfectly positions you to take advantage of a new market, you still need to go learn what your customers actually need.

Why?

Your problems are not everyone's problems

Founders as a demographic are surprisingly homogeneous. Most are white, male, and economically secure. Many have engineering, consulting, or product backgrounds.

When similar people build companies based on their own experiences, you get a concentration of ideas solving the same problems for the same customers. These "memetic markets" are small to begin with and saturate quickly, making it hard to stand out and scale.

Unfortunately, the problems founders know best are often:

1/ Not important: they aren't solving real problems for large, underserved populations.

Example: the many, many companies that focus on note taking, todo list management, distributed meetings, or calendar management.

While these issues might be top of mind for you, 80% of people don't organize their notes at all. Most people don't need a "better calendar app" because they don't use one to begin with.

Worse, founders trying to build solutions to unimportant problems often diagnose the problem too generically. When there aren't critical flaws to existing products, you get vague value props that don't resonate. Tackling more important problems enables you to pick a specific persona to serve, and define solutions that are clear and easy to understand.

2/ Not urgent: they don't address must-solve problems people will pay for immediately.

Most crypto products are solutions in search of a problem. Turns out, most people beyond drug dealers and day traders are fine with our financial infrastructure and have no urgent concerns they need solved with an entirely new data model.

Escaping this trap means admitting that your own problems just might not be that existential, and looking elsewhere for more acute ones.

3/ Too narrow: They focus on small segments of users and potentially misdiagnose the root cause of the problem.

Meetup apps are a great example of a product category that solves a non-urgent problem for a relatively small segment of users: single, unmarried city dwellers without kids. The reality is that most people aren't lying awake at night wondering how to meet strangers who share their interests in person.

Avoiding this trap is hard because you might see early traction from selling into your existing network, but you'll put a ceiling on your scale that might not show up for years. The only way to solve this is by structuring your early product process differently.

What to do instead: The Market/Passion/Customer Framework

So if not "founder-market fit," how should you decide what to build?

1. Identify a market-making disruption

Great startups come from massive disruptions created by one of three forces:

• A new/emerging technology (e.g., AI)

• Dramatic change in consumer behavior (e.g., e-commerce)

• Regulation (e.g., new energy regulations)

Instead of narrowly focusing on your experience, start by taking yourself out of the equation. Ask: What are the massive disruptions changing the world right now?

These disruptions create opportunity in two ways:

• New market disruption: Creating consumption where there wasn't any before (like smartphones enabling Uber)

• Low market disruption: Doing the same thing as incumbents but at a fraction of the cost (like Amazon Prime)

Even in big shifts, the most commercializable opportunities are usually just one step around the corner—not five years into the future. What's the next obvious use case that will open up from this disruption?

2. Focus on what interests you

You'll likely be working on your startup for the next 10 years if you're successful. So the question isn't "What do I have experience in?," but rather "What do I like thinking about?"

I'm interested in marketing as a space, but more importantly, I genuinely love our customers. When you don't like your customers, it shows in your product, your go-to-market efforts, and your customer service.

Part of why you like something can also be entirely personal: for example, my parents are small business owners themselves, so I've seen firsthand how existential the problem Blaze solves is, and how enormous our market is. I care about winning for them.

3. Talk to actual people before building anything

This is the critical step that most founders skip. You must talk to potential customers before investing significant time or money in developing a product.

Here's a quick way to get feedback on a concept:

1. Build a landing page with a basic premise (like "AI for marketing")

2. Spend a few hundred dollars on ads targeting your potential customers

3. Create a simple funnel: ads → landing page → demo booking

4. On those calls, learn about your customers' reality and their needs, hopes, and dreams

Ultimately you'll want to create a force-ranked list of the most acute, clearly articulated problems you hear from them, instead of a generic value prop.

Think bigger.

Falling into the founder-market fit trap can be shockingly easy. But building for a too-familiar customer—you—can make it impossible to break out and grow.

If you choose to build for others, there will be uncomfortable moments as your assumptions get challenged and shattered. And the road will be bumpier than building for your friends and colleagues.

But it's worth it. By understanding the customers you want to serve—and ideally enjoying their company—you can build something specific, effective, and ultimately more successful than anything you would have built to solve your own problems.